Pantone Spot Colors in Illustrator

I’m writing this blog post to explain how recent updates to Pantone Matching System are affecting Adobe apps and show you an easy trick to help you with Spot Colors in Illustrator.

I’ll share quick definitions of Process and Spot Colors, RGB and CMYK colors modes, and show you a quick and easy way to add Pantone Spot Color swatches to your Illustrator designs before sending them off to print. This ensures that your printed materials match brand colors perfectly.

This post is based on one of the videos from my Illustrator Advanced Course. When you become a BYOL member, you gain access to this course as well as my 30+ additional courses on After Effects, Photoshop, Figma, Lightroom, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Head here to sign-up!

What happened to Pantone color books?

Adobe had Pantone color libraries licensed for apps like Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign at no extra cost. This agreement changed and Pantone is now asking users for an additional subscription to access to their full color catalog, through an Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) extension: Pantone Connect. Since August 2022, Pantone color books have been slowly taken out of Adobe apps and, right now, they are only available in the paid service.

This means added costs for designers and clients, so it’s important to determine if it’s worth investing in one more premium service. Pantone ensures color and brand consistency, especially in print media, meeting the highest demanding client expectations – there is only one Coca-Cola red, right? On the other hand, strong brands have their own design systems and color palettes, so they usually send strict guidelines that lead to the right options.

If you are a freelancer, plan carefully every investment and make sure that income tops expenses. I’m here to help you with some of these hard decisions and show you how you can, at least for now, find a way to keep Pantone colors properly checked before sending your artboards for printing.

Let’s begin with some color basics and start walking uphill from there.

What are Process and Spot Color Printing?

Process color printing is based on the combination of four basic ink colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK). Process colors are derived from specific percentual combinations of each of these base colors. Percentage variations allow for thousands of different colors, ideal for printing complex-colored images, like photographs.

Spot Colors are premixed before the printing process takes place and are applied directly and unchanged to the page. Spot Color printing is used to print a small number of exact colors, all matching brand identity and guidelines, like corporate newsletters, stationery, and brochures.

It is possible to combine Process and Spot Color printing when you’re designing documents that combine photos and brand elements like logos or color elements that must be compliant to brand specifications.

All of these options come with different costs, so always talk to your printers, let them know what your client needs, ask for suggestions and price information, it will save you precious time and lots of money.  

What are Color Modes?

Color Modes define how colors are created and identified in print and digital media. These are the most common Color Modes you will be working with in Adobe apps:

• Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black (CMYK)

We know this one. CMYK is used for printing and creates colors from the percentual combination of these four basic inks.

• Red, Green, Blue (RGB)

You probably know this one, too. RGB can be found on digital screens, from TVs to monitors and digital cameras. Colors are created by combining different intensities or red, green, and blue light. Hexadecimal (HEX) codes are connected to RGB color mode and used in digital media, especially web design and coding. Colors are represented by a six-digit hexadecimal code that displays red, green, and blue intensity values in a more compact and browser-friendly structure.

• Hue, Saturation, Brightness (HSB)

HSB is used in graphic design and digital art. Colors are created from a specific hue and the percentual combination of color intensity (or saturation) and brightness values. 

What’s a Pantone color?

A Pantone color is a specific color variation, identified with a unique code, and part of the Pantone Matching System, an industry standard for color reproduction. If we share an artwork with the PMS 1788 C color in it, we can be sure that we have Coca-Cola vibrant red anywhere in the world! Consistency and precision, check! Pantones are also great to add special finishing effects to print by including unique colors, like metallics, fluorescents, and pastels.

And this is how this Pantone color can be represented across different color modes:

I hope this quick intro gives you a good idea of what’s coming up next. Let’s explore how we can match Pantone colors in Illustrator!

Spot Color Books in Illustrator

I’ll start by showing you where Pantone color books used to be located. Why? Because there are other standard color reference guides, although not as universally used as Pantone, but still worth browsing and fit into your workflow, when necessary.

We can access Color by clicking on Window > Swatch Libraries > Color Books and then pick the reference you are looking for. As an example, I’ll choose ‘HKS K’ from HKS, another color matching system like Pantone, less global and more common in Europe. The ‘K’ in ‘HKS K’ comes from the German word Kunststoff (plastic), which means this color book is designed for use with glossy or coated paper. There are other books from HKS, like ‘E’ (continuous stationery), ‘N’ (natural paper), or ‘Z’ for newsprint. Printing is a cool world to explore, give it some time, you’ll have fun!

Inside the ‘HKS K’ color book window, we find the group of Spot Color swatches included in the ‘K’ category. We can click and drag the window’s edge to make it bigger and get a more expanded view of the items, increase the color thumbnail size, or change view to Small or Large View List, so we can also see the codes for each Spot Color, and not just the thumbnail. Codes are key! Remember to know and use them, because that is the essential information you must send to your printers if you want color matching precision.

If our client has agreed to use the HKS K color ‘10 K’ in the project we are working on, we can type the specific code reference in the search field and Illustrator will sort the right swatch for us.

Next, we click on the thumbnail to have it applied to our selected object, in this case the ‘Granada’ text in the wordmark logo.

Timeout #1

Dive deeper into the Pantone Matching System, learn what it is, how it’s used, and some of its limitations for graphic designers.

How to Add your own Spot Colors to Illustrator

Let’s say our client’s branding or marketing team sent us project specs for colors and measurements with specific pantone colors for their logo. How can we match Pantone Spot Colors in our Illustrator file?

We can create our own Spot Colors and give them their proper Pantone code, making it easy for us and for the printers to keep everything consistent and accurate. Let’s see how it’s done!

Let’s start with the Pantones our client sent us: 4985 C and 694 C. ‘C’ stands for Coated, or glossy printing. These are the premixed Pantone colors that will be used to print our wordmark logotype.

We need to translate this codename into a real color in Illustrator. We’ve seen how we can do it! All those different ways to represent a color, right? We can use a search engine or any website that converts Pantone names into a Hexadecimal code, or RGB, CMYK, and HSB values, etc.

I’ve found this sample image that includes the similar Hex code. Similarity is key to understanding all of this work. Pantone Spot Colors result from unique and very precise color mixes, so the colors we see in our screens are close references, but may not be 100% accurate – that’s why naming is the most important detail.

I had the hex code translated into other visual or color representations. Let’s have a quick look at two of these, CMYK and RGB, or printing and screen color modes.

Pantone 4985 C can be represented as:

• CMYK: the mix of 0% Cyan, 44% Magenta, 39% Yellow, and 47% black.

• RGB: the combination of 135 intensity Red light, 75 intensity Green light, and 82 intensity Blue light.

Here’s another important takeaway from this topic.

To print a logo colored with 4985 C in CMYK, printers will blend three colors to match the original. However, using Pantone Spot Color requires just one color, so it may reduce costs for you and your client. Your printers will know the best options for printing your work, you need to plan for the best price.

Let’s jump into Illustrator!

We choose our text object using the Selection tool (shortcut V), move the mouse to the Properties panel and click on the Fill color thumbnail, under Appearance. Inside the Color Mixer panel, we type the Hex code we found online into the value field. We can also type the RGB intensity values, or CMYK mix percentages into the boxes next to the color sliders, either way will work fine.

Now that we have our color representation, let’s set it up as a new Spot Color swatch. To do this, we click on the Settings button placed in the top right corner of the Color Picker window and select Create New Swatch…

Inside the New Swatch window, we begin by typing the Swatch Name, making sure we include the exact Pantone name, in this case ‘4985 c’.

Next, in Color Type, we click on the drop-down and pick Spot Color.

Finally, we keep Color Mode and Hex Code information unchanged and click OK to finish.

Let’s go back to Fill and, this time, click on Swatches and see if our new Spot Color swatch is home. And there it is! If we hover the mouse cursor over the thumbnail, the Pantone swatch name will pop up! Cool, huh? Our first Spot Color is now ready!

How do we know it is a Spot Color? Let’s zoom in a bit. Can you see the little dot (or spot) on the thumbnail’s bottom right corner, below?

That’s the signal that indicates this is a Spot Color swatch! We’re doing great so far! Let’s push on!  

Separations Preview Panel in Illustrator

Let’s have a quick look at the Separations Preview panel in Illustrator, so we can have a clear idea of how colors are separately applied to our artwork while it’s printed.

The color layers we see in the image below are called Color Plates. We have five color plates assigned to this print job. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, and the Spot Color 4985 c. A printing press will apply each one of these semi-transparent ink layers in sequence. As they overlay, they mix into a wide range of colors.

If we click on the Visibility Toggle switch (the little eye icon next to each layer), we can see how each individual color will look.

Timeout #2

Check out this Adobe Illustrator guide on Printing. It covers everything from simple print-at-home settings to more advanced professional printing options. 

Let’s go through the steps again to make another Spot Color swatch in Illustrator, this time using Pantone 694 c. Quick and easy:

• Look online for the second Pantone’s equivalent Hexadecimal code.

• Select the wordmark logo’s second text line.

• Create the new Fill color and Create New Swatch…

• Name the new Spot Color ‘Pantone 694 c’.

• Check the Swatches panel and apply the Spot Color to ‘Donuts’.

Awesome! This may feel like a lot of steps, but it only takes a few minutes of our time and gives us safety and peace of mind as we send our artboards to print. We are sure  that the client Pantone guidelines will be fully respected, even without built-in Pantone color books or subscribing to a paid service.

If you want to be 100% sure, ask your printers for a proof, a sample of the printed material and compare it to your client’s specifications. It’s the best practice, believe me!

 This doesn’t mean you should or shouldn’t subscribe to Pantone Connect. It’s all up to your work method, your clients’ demands, and how often you work with print media. If a significant part of your projects are designed for screens, you may be fine with this workaround. If you do a lot of work in photography and art, and design print media like brochures, flyers, stationery, packaging, outdoor billboards, magazines, newsletters, or books, Pantone Connect could be a smart choice for you. Weight pros and cons, talk with your clients and printers, and come up with a solution that benefits all, without breaking the bank! 

And there we have it!

Thanks for following me down this colorful journey! That’s it for this post on Process and Spot Colors, Pantones, Color Modes, and Swatches. If you take another peek at the image below and manage to look past that charming guy, and actually make sense of what’s going on, I’ll be the happiest Adobe Certified Instructor out there!

What 's Next?

To go deeper with Illustrator, join BYOL and you will gain access to my Illustrator Essentials and Advanced courses as well as my 30+ additional courses on Figma, Photoshop,  Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Webflow, and more. As a BYOL member you will also enjoy personalized support, earn certificates, and tackle exciting community challenges. Get started here. 

See you in class! – Dan